HP Mainframe Connectivity Design Guide

Fabric rules

This section describes the fabric rules for McDATA FICON directors and other factors you should

consider when building McDATA FICON fabrics.

Operating systems and storage products

The fabric rules for McDATA FICON directors apply to SANs that include the following operating

systems and storage products:

Storage productsOperating systems

P9500z/OS

XP20000/24000z/VM

XP10000/12000OS/390

XP128/1024

For more information, see “Mainframe rules” (page 86), “P9500 storage system rules” (page 103),

and “XP storage system rules” (page 110).

Fabric rules for McDATA FICON directors

The following fabric rules apply to all McDATA FICON directors. FICON rules, especially for

routing and ISL hops, are more restrictive than FCP rules. Therefore, the maximum number of

directors in a fabric might not be a practical number for a FICON environment.

Table 27 (page 67) describes the rules for creating a SAN with McDATA FICON directors.

Table 27 McDATA FICON fabric rules

DescriptionRule number

All FICON directors in the same fabric or SAN must use the same version of firmware. When updating

director firmware, you can use two successive director firmware versions temporarily in the SAN.

In general, FICON fabrics and intermix fabrics must contain directors of the same series. For

exceptions, see “Interoperability with B-series directors” (page 70).

In addition to the series-specific zoning rules covered in “B-series FICON directors and fabric rules”

(page 29), “C-series FICON directors and fabric rules” (page 46), and “McDATA FICON directors

and fabric rules” (page 63), FICON directors with CUP enabled also support PDCM. Mainframe

fabric administrators use this matrix to allow or prohibit connectivity between FICON ports on the

director. They can also use PDCM to block or unblock a port. Blocking a port prohibits all connectivity

through that port, effectively disabling it.

There is a maximum of one hop (two directors) between any two communicating FICON

devices—mainframe to CU, or mainframe to CTC.

FICON directors with CUP enabled are configured on the mainframe as follows:5

• Device type = 2032

• LCU = x'00'

• Device address (unit address) = x'00'

• Link address = x'FE'

There is a maximum of 31 directors and 2,048 total ports (firmware 09.xx.xx or later).6

For zoning limits, see Table 30 (page 69).

There is a maximum of four SAN LPARs on the Mi10K, with one SAN LPAR supporting FICON.7

There is a maximum of eight Open VSANs per director, with a maximum of four Open VSANs per

Mi10K SAN LPAR.

Fabric rules 67